Infrastructure Monitoring is the key process and methods to diagnose and troubleshoot the performance and capacity problems across different components of the datacenter such as compute, storage, network and security before a production outage occur. Monitoring the IT infrastructure resources and generating alerts automatically will allow organizations to get the most efficient use of the resources by ensuring that computing, networking, and storage resources are properly allocated and that they are correctly engineered and are working as expected.
Also Read: Infrastructure Security Basics and Fundamentals
Previously, we learned the basics and fundamentals of the important components of any IT datacenter such as Compute Virtualization, Storage, Network and Security. In this post, we will quickly review the basic concepts of Infrastructure Monitoring such as different types of Monitoring approaches, techniques, design and best practices that need to be implemented in both on-prem and cloud datacenter.
Infrastructure Monitoring Overview
Every Organization depends on IT resources to create application and deliver their products and services for running business. Organizations completely rely and must build and maintain an IT infrastructure to run the businesses. IT infrastructure means all of the assets that are necessary to deliver and support IT services in the data centers such as Compute servers, networks, computer hardware and software, storage, and other equipment.
Organizations implements specialized software tools that aggregate data in the form of event logs from throughout the organization’s IT infrastructure landscape. Event logs are automatically computer generated by applications or devices on the network in response to network traffic or user activity. These log files contain information such as
- Time and date that the event occurred
- The user that was logged into the machine
- The name of the computer
- A unique identifier
- The source of the event
- Description of the event type.
Some log files may also contain additional information depending on the application where they originated.
Monitoring softwares or tools can be used to capture these log files from various sources and aggregate them into a single database where they can be sorted, queried and analyzed by either humans or machine algorithms. Using this type of infrastructure monitoring, IT organizations can detect operational issues, identify possible security breaches or malicious attacks and identify new areas of business opportunity.
Monitoring tools also helps Organizations to determine if additional capacity is required and implement the changes before the production systems are affected by performance issues. Problems with deployment can also be determined and resolved preferably before they become serious, and steps can be taken to remediate them either manually or by using automation. This data can also be used to plan for future expansion as well as view trends and be proactive in resolving any issues before they become larger.
